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Does your blog have a mission statement?

After nearly 5 years, my blog finally has a mission statement. If you asked me about it six months ago, I would have had to admit that I had never really thought about it before. Since then, I’ve been reading Joe Pulizzi‘s latest book, Epic Content Marketing, and it has me itching to put some of his suggestions into action. It seems that the first step to becoming an “epic content marketer” is to take some time and write a mission statement for your blog, website, or wherever you publish your content. Joe details his idea in Chapter 13 of his book (and yes you should buy the book), so I thought I’d take it to heart and write the davidhallsocialmedia.com mission statement.

I tried to follow Joe’s model of writing a successful mission statement. He suggests that you need to communicate:

Who the core audience target is

What you will deliver to the audience

The major audience take-away

So without boring you with all the internal struggle, numerous revisions, and trepidation about (finally) inscribing in stone what the purpose of this blog is, I’ll get right to what I came up with:

Create and curate engaging content for Digital, Marketing, and PR professionals. Posts are designed to help us (myself included) better understand how social media connects with our profession and how it can be used to take advantage of opportunities that were never before possible.

Now the challenge is to stick to my newly-articulated mission. Many of my previous posts deliver on this mission, and I will ensure that all future posts do. I have posted this mission statement as the first thing on my about page and plan on referring to it when I come up with a blog post idea that I’m not too certain fits this blog. If it’s not covered in my mission statement, I won’t publish it.

This was a fun exercise that helped me articulate exactly why I write here. If you’re a content creator, I suggest giving it a try. What’s the worst that can happen?

2 Comments to “Does your blog have a mission statement?”

Always useful David to be purposeful in our writings and online presence. I had set-up my personal blog awhile back and went through a similar thought process on it. To be honest, I never really resolved the issue – I just started occasionally writing and then afterwards realized that my mission statement for my blog was that it was to be the on-line container for everything in my life that didn’t fit well somewhere else in my digital ecoysystem (http://ryanandrosoff.ca/about/). I admit, I took a bit of an easy way out :-)

Glad to see that you are blogging regularly again BTW, always enjoy your posts!

When I started my blog, I planned on simply taking a communications approach to social media trends. I slowly found that my area of interest was expanding into marketing, advertising, digital, and education. Prompted by the Pulizzi book, I thought I’d try to ink something that gives me direction, and lets the readers know what to expect.

It looks like you’re just getting underway on a super-exciting project with OECD. Tweet me (@David_Hall) when you’re back in Ottawa, I would love to catch up and hear what you’re up to in Paris.